Antoinette Renouf is Research Professor in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Central England (UCE), Birmingham, and Director of the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES), a unit which has conducted empirical linguistic research since the late 80s, particularly into the relationship between surface word patterning in text and deeper meaning, and has created ground-breaking automated information retrieval systems. Her interest as a linguist is in the unique insights into language use thereby gained, in areas including word formation, lexical semantics and the changing lexicon.

Andrew Kehoe is a Research Fellow at the same university. An English language and computing graduate, he joined RDUES in 1999 as a software developer on the APRIL project, which monitored and classified new words in text across time. Since 2001, he has worked primarily on the WebCorp project, developing a suite of tools to access the World Wide Web as a corpus, and now creating a linguistically-tailored search engine to improve performance.